The human eye can suffer a number of maladies causing mild deterioration to complete loss of vision. While contact lenses and eyeglasses can compensate for some ailments, ophthalmic surgery is required for others. Generally, ophthalmic surgery is classified into posterior segment procedures, such as vitreoretinal surgery, and anterior segment procedures, such as cataract surgery. More recently, combined anterior and posterior segment procedures have been developed.
The surgical instrumentation used for ophthalmic surgery can be specialized for anterior segment procedures or posterior segment procedures or support both. Such surgical instrumentation can comprise a Vitreoretinal and Cataract microsurgical console. Such a surgical console can provide a variety of functions depending on the surgical procedure and surgical instrumentation. For example, surgical consoles can expedite cataract surgeries (e.g. phacoemulsification procedures) by helping manage irrigation and aspiration flows into and out of a surgical site. And of course surgical consoles can provide other functions.
Thus, Vitreoretinal and Cataract microsurgical consoles usually have a defined set of functionality, such as vitreous cutting, vacuum, etc. Currently, interfaces to these surgical systems allow a user to interact with the surgical system based solely on the functionality of the system. Thus, if a user desires to implement one function he must select this function from a group of functions and configure the desired parameters for the use of the function. This method of interaction with a surgical console is highly inefficient. Many surgical procedures comprise many steps where each of the steps may encompass the use of one or more of the functions of the surgical console and different parameters or sub-modes for these functions. Furthermore, the number of steps and functionality of the surgical system utilized with each step may vary widely from procedure to procedure. Thus, when implementing a particular surgical procedure a user must remember the steps of that particular surgical procedure and for each of the steps select the appropriate function of the surgical console and configure the parameters for the function appropriately. This may require a large degree of interaction with the surgical console (e.g. use of a footswitch or other input methodology) in order to implement a surgical procedure. Therefore there is a need for a system and method for procedural based interaction with a surgical console.